RPG where each member of the players’ party needs to be fed regularly, but the game
does not provide any clear way of easily communicating how hungry their characters
are. Then, if one of the party members suddenly keels over from starvation, the players
will become frustrated, and rightly so. Why should players have to guess at or go dig-
ging for such game-critical information? In an action game, if players have to kill an
enemy by shooting it in a particular location of its body, say its eye, they need to receive
positive feedback when they successfully land a blow. Perhaps the enemy reels back in
pain or screams in agony once an attack damages him. If players do not receive such
feedback, how are they supposed to know they are on the right track? Of course, all
computer games conceal a certain amount of information from players, and cannot pos-
sibly communicate all of the information they have about the game-world to players.
But they must communicate what is reasonable and important for the players to know,
and communicate that data effectively.
Almost all games present players with a view of the game-world as the central part
of their output system. Through this view players see the object they are currently con-
trolling and its location and state in the game-world. Your game should try to
communicate as much information through this view as possible. Consider a
third-person 3D action game. Certainly players see the environment and position of
their game-world surrogate, but what about the condition of the player character? Per-
haps as its health goes down, the character’s animations change to a limp or hobble
instead of moving normally. Similarly, the strength of the current armor can be repre-
sented by texture changes on that character, with the armor appearing more and more
deteriorated as it takes damage and nears destruction. The game can represent the
character’s current weapon by showing that weapon equipped on the character. If play-
ers have a spell of protection currently in effect on their character, perhaps the
character should emit a certain glow to easily communicate that. Though the designer
may also want to include this data in a heads up display (HUD) of some sort, communi-
cating it through the game’s primary game-world view makes it that much more
transparent and easy for players to understand.
What the game-world view cannot represent is typically contained in some sort of a
GUI, which usually borders the game-world view or is overlaid on top of it like a HUD.
This GUI may be simple, such as the high-score and lives remaining display onCenti-
pede, the small potion-health display at the bottom of the screen in the originalPrince of
Persia, or the score/moves display in almost any Infocom game. For more complicated
games, the GUI is also more complex, such as the button bars used in any of Maxis’Sim
games, the elaborate status display in the originalSystem Shock, or the extensive party
data provided in many RPGs, such as theBard’s Talegames. Many GUIs in older games
were created in order to block off a large portion of the screen. This was not because of
any sort of design decision, but instead because the game’s engine was not fast enough
to handle rendering the game-world full screen. As engine technology has improved,
games have attempted to make the game-world view take up the majority of the screen,
with the GUI minimized as much as possible.
A few games try to work without any GUI whatsoever.Crash Bandicoot, for
instance, only displays the lives remaining GUI if players press a button to bring it on
the screen; otherwise a completely unobstructed view of the world is displayed.
Another example isOddworld: Abe’s Oddysee. The game’s director, Lorne Lanning, felt
Chapter 7: The Elements of Gameplay 137